[溫哥華本地新聞] At Home: Study shows people are healthier and use crisis services, getting, people

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At Home: Study shows people are healthier and use crisis services less after getting a home

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Home+Study+shows+people+healthier+crisis+services+less+after+getting+home/7624585/story.html#ixzz2DcoCksZw
For decades, Anne Newman went to bed every night not knowing if her youngest son Cameron, who is profoundly deaf and has schizophrenia, was safe and warm.
But for the past two years, she has fallen asleep knowing he was in his own apartment, with outreach workers monitoring his remarkable transformation from a chronically homeless man with untreated mental illness.
“It is truly a miracle,” Newman said. “He has gone from homeless and scaring everyone to bits ... (to) he now has a part-time job and is holding down a little apartment in the West End.”
The astounding change in Cameron began after his worried family fought to have him committed under the Mental Health Act. His psychiatrist later recommended he apply to enter the national At Home/Chez Soi study, which is examining how best to help homeless, mentally ill people.
After entering the study in 2011, he was given an apartment and provided with outreach workers and support services.
Until then, Cameron, 48, had spent much of his life in turmoil.
As a teenager, he went “totally out of control” after discovering drugs and alcohol, Newman said. The large, tight-knit family did not realize he had a mental illness until he was diagnosed in his 20s.
As an adult, Cameron became a paranoid man with a deep, guttural voice (caused by the deafness) who drank too much, was often arrested by police and made irrational statements triggered by his schizophrenia.
Today, he is taking medication, so his thoughts are more rational. He has a part-time job as a janitor. He quit drinking and smoking. And he obeys the law.
“This has given Cameron a new life, a total new life,” Newman said. “It is so heartwarming.”
The national, $110-million three-year study, funded by the federal government and overseen by the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC), is examining whether people like Cameron can stabilize if they are given a home first, and then support services.
Preliminary data from the first half of the study indicates the participants are leading healthier lives and rely much less on expensive crisis services, such as jails and emergency rooms.
The data also suggests the money spent on housing and supporting the participants may be a better use of taxpayers’ money.
But funding for the three-year study expires March 2013, and it is unclear what will happen to the 300 people who received homes as part of the $30-million Vancouver arm of the study.
The MHCC is negotiating with the federal government to, at the very least, extend the rent payments for those 300 people, possibly for as long as two years. That would allow academic researchers time to analyze all the data and present evidence that this model should be expanded to help other homeless people with mental illnesses.
The federal government has not confirmed whether it will extend funding beyond March 2013, but says it is working on a “transition plan” for the participants.
If Ottawa provides no additional cash, the provincial government has promised no one will be sent back to the street and that some medical services will be made available to the participants.
But with just four months to go before the study ends, details are scarce.
If there was a poster child for this study, it might be Emily Grant.
When she became a participant in November 2009, she was coming off a four-year bout of depression, homelessness and drug use.

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Despite a few setbacks, Grant, 28, eventually quit the drugs, finished her Grade 12 diploma, took a counselling course at college, and is now working as a paid peer support worker for the study.

“I would have been seen by many as a lost cause,” the articulate woman said. “I didn’t want to be (on the street) any more but I didn’t know how to dig myself out.”

The study, she said, gave her the shovel she needed to dig. Just last month, she checked herself out of the project and is now paying her own way in life.

Grant was receiving $1,150 per month in welfare and disability payments, plus a $750 rent subsidy from this study. Today, Grant pays all her bills herself.

“It really does work. I’m a good example. I’m no longer receiving any government subsidies. I am paying my own rent,” she said. “It would have been a more difficult journey if the At Home study was not accessible to me. And it would have cost taxpayers more money.”

SFU health sciences associate professor Julian Somers, the study’s lead researcher, has analyzed the changes in the participants since the first one was given a home in October 2009.

What has stabilized most of the participants, he said, is not merely the four walls around them, but the outreach workers who guide them every day. But continued success for most of them, Somers said, is unlikely if they are given watered-down medical services and lose their outreach workers.

Governments must decide soon about extending — and, ideally, expanding — the funding for this project, he said. “When does it become too late to renew leases and provide reassurance?”

When this program first began in the fall of 2009, there were many skeptics who questioned spending millions of dollars to help people who were considered by most to be beyond help. Some critics remain, but many supporters have emerged.

Tatiana Moisseeva is a landlord of a Kerrisdale apartment building where two of the study’s participants have lived for nearly two years. She has given some advice to the two tenants as they adjusted to living inside, such as keeping their carpets clean, but said they haven’t caused major damage or disruption in the building.

“I don’t have any big problems with them. Of course they need some patience. I try to help them to have a nice place.... and have a normal life,” she said.

Megan Branson is one of the many employers in Vancouver who have given part-time jobs to some of the study participants. Her Olla Urban Flower Project in Gastown, which specializes in ethically sourced plants and has a social policy to hire someone with barriers to employment, gave a job to a participant for many months.

It was not a charity hire, Branson said. When the man was at work, he kept her shop clean and greeted people when they came in.

“We hope to fill that position again with somebody associated with a project like this,” she said.

The At Home study is modelled after similar projects in New York and Los Angeles, which show that long-term homeless people with mental illnesses can lead productive lives after they are given a home and a helping hand.

No one knows that more than Newman, 78, who lives in Qualicum Beach where there are few services to help her son.

Cameron, she said, is worried about the money for study’s support services coming to an end.

“God help us if they don’t get the funding,” said Newman. “The money is being so well spent and there is so much more that needs to be done for the mentally ill.”

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Emily Grant who was a participant in a $110 million project into housing 500 chronically homeless, poses for photographs in Vancouver, B.C., November 1, 2012.

Emily Grant who was a participant in a $110 million project into housing 500 chronically homeless, poses for photographs in Vancouver, B.C., November 1, 2012.